Vaduz Orbital Collective
"The first to greet me upon entering the system were, unsurprisingly, the Vaduz, an autonamous nation existing entirely within the void between Parime and its moons. A lot of effort goes into making their stations seem tranquil and cultured to visitors like myself, as if many of the residents aren't constantly fighting the three-generations rule even with the gradual intergration of Union tech, but the conspicuous monitoring of my water-useage in my accomodations is more truthful on the matter. No effort, however, is made on hiding their idiosyncratic culture of widespread transhumanism, skepticism towards gravity and other 'earthly bondages', and an unfettered willingness to deal with anything that assails their voidborn-culture with cold-blooded efficiency and brutality."
"Lemme tell you something about Vaduz, squire: Used to be that someone would go missing once in a while, and law-enforcement would put up a token investigation but they'd get no witnesses, even if a crowd was present when the poor slot got pushed out an airlock. Why? Because that person was sloppy on the job, maybe he puts off on replacing air-filters or let mold grow in the corners of vent-units, but he wasn't going to get shifted elsewhere before the damage was done. Everyone quietly agreed that they needed to die and be replaced, because it only takes a few cut corners to get a lot more people killed and write off a whole station. I'm not saying the Vaduz are at all right to be as cruel as they are, mind you. Just that you've got to look past the culture-habs and collaborative-poetry sessions of the current times, and realise these are a people who haven't had the luxury to relax or joke about things for generations, and they're only just starting to bounce back from that. You wanna make one of those skinnies mad? Grab the water-bottle you always see hanging from their side and empty it into their face. They'll break your arm on principle."
Structure
The Vaduz colonies operate on an Athenian system of representative-democracy and partial lottocracy: Individual stations hold regular votes for representative leaders, referred to as 'Directors', who in turn manage their respective stations, appoint heads of staff and report to the Chief-Administrators of Vaduz Central. The colonies practice systems of 'less-than-whole-citizenship' (as described by Union officials) whereupon suffrage/voting-rights are only granted to those who have served at least three years in a governmental/federal career or service. Vaduz defends this system of 'service-for-suffrage' by claiming that it ensures the power of voting remains in the hands of those who are willing to put the needs of their community before themselves, and that federal service is open to all citizens, regardless background, ability or personal-ethics. The Union Departmenf of Justice and Human Rights however, remain adamant on their decleration of the service-for-suffrage system as a violation of human rights.
Culture
For many generations, Vaduzian culture centered around a ubiquitous ideal of 'Spacer discipline', that everyone who lived aboard a station was expected to live within strict expectations of duty and responsibility towards the long-term wellbeing of their enviroment, as any degree of carelessness aboard an enviroment as fragile as a space station can easily escalate into a life-threatening situation. Through these constraints have been loosened over the centuries by way of increasingly reliable automation of station maintenence and management, the nature of spacer discipline is still naturally ingrained into the people of Vaduz, and many of their cultural and artistic idiosyncracies still have their roots in utilitarian needs.
The citizenry of Vaduz are, sterotypically, exceptionally aware of societal and enviromental aspects compared to their non-spacer peers, feeling a civic duty to report and assist in any problem they come across without expectation of recompense. A junior-technician replacing carbon-filters is considered just as important to a station's continued existence as the engineering-head dictating station-wide powerflow, reducing cultural importance placed on job-mobility, and a cultural emphasis on 'celebrating your position'. This civic-mindedness, however, came at the expense of substantially reduced civic and social-rights that still persists in smaller stations (wearing of noise-cancelling headphones outside of special circumstances was considered a punishable misdemeanor until 5001u), draconian management of water and brutal punishments towards significant negligence or hostility.
Socially, the typical Vaduz colonist comes across as rather aloof and blunt. Clear communication is an essential for keeping on top of the daily needs of a space-habitat, and as a result Vaduz culture places great importance on mainaining stoicism and truthfulness in conversation, while strongly looking down on deliberate misrepresentation or omission of pertinent facts: When the station's wellbeing is on the line, being quick and unambiguous in what you say is paramount. Conversely, Vaduz colonists are also very sincere about their passions and loves, unashamedly expressing affection and camaraderie with their crewmates with little prompting and taking open interest in their wellbeing as much as is appropriate. The importance of maintaining a healthy psyche for shipboard discipline (and as of recent, a desire to intergrate and impress visitors from Union-space) has also led to many stations taking a very active interest in ensuring that its inhabitants are properly enriched and to create and display cultural identities unique and idiosyncratic to Vaduz and its individual stations.
Second only to Spacer Discipline is the Vaduz's love for transhumanism: Once a necessity for the natural consequences of long durations spent in enviroments with unreliable access to artificial gravity, many Vaduz still opt to undergo extensive cybernetic augmentation for personal preference and cultural identity, proudly displaying prosthetics that value utilitarianism or the Vaduz ideals of mass-reduction over any attempt to appear human-like. Vaduz outright encourages such attitudes through extensive funding into cybernetics and machine-interfacing technology, proclaiming access to android bodies as a medical-right, and offering substantial perks for government employees willing to install cybernetic hardware that increases their productivity.
Rights
- Pillar I: Sufficient fulfilment. Universal food, shelter and medical care (including Union-regulation-compliant Android frames) are provided unconditionally but primarily through regulated private entities, with distribution of water in particular being strictly rationed.
- Pillar II: Sufficient fulfilment. Travel in and around Vaduzian voidspace is unrestricted, albeit with limits on mass and volume and wartime security measures.
- Pillar III: Partial/insufficient fulfilment. Enrollment of youth in military-academies and 'spaceborn discipline' mandating participation in station maintenence are both ubiquitous. Monetary debt and inequality are present but regulatory legislation prevents forced and/or economic bondage.
Civil Rights: Low/Medium-Risk. Personal/cultural bigotries are present, but legislation protects citizens from institional prejudices, including protection for cloned individuals and limited protection for NHPs. The right to due process and a fair trial is provided, but citizens have only limited rights to privacy and silence under interrogation, and Vigilantism is a present issue in many stations. Many of Vaduz's civil-rights restrictions are claimed to be byproducts of needed utilitarianism in spaceborn colonisation, and governing bodies have been willing to overturn many of such restrictions since introduction of modern automation into Vaduzian stations.
Political Rights: Medium Risk. Joining political parties and expression/demonstration of beliefs are unrestricted, but voting and running for political office are both restricted to citizens who have performed a minimum term of federal employment. Vaduzian governing bodies remain unmoved on their stance of 'Service for Suffrage', despite being a substantial obstacle to their assimilation into Union Space, but a minority of civilian electors are advocating for reformation of this system in favor of universal/unconditional voting rights.
Suggested Resolution: Coercive measures have been deemed as not yet necesarry for ensuring cooperation in ammendment of HR violations. Administration is recommended to continue pursuing diplomatic avenues through civilian electors and incentivisation with Union-provided technologies, with economic sanctions kept on standby if current methods fail to meet projected goals over the following years.
Naming Convention
The need for clear communication in Vaduz's low error-tolerance enviroment necessitates clear and understandable nomenclature for summoning and issuing orders to station crew, and so a citizen's occupation and identification-numbers are intergrated into the names registered in Vaduz's citizenry. A citizen's title is officially ordered as follows:<Station Callsign> <Occupational Rank> <Family-Name> <Station Occupational Registry Number> <Citizen/Elector> <Given Name>
It begins with the Station Callsign, the official monicker for the crewman's space-station or ship they are assigned to, followed by their job-title and rank, then their family-name. The citizen's Station Occupational Registry Number - which determines their position in a crew's command-hierarchy - comes next, through it may be presented before or in lieu of a family-name on larger-staffed stations or stations where multiple crewmen with the same family-name are working. Finally, a citizen's title as Citizen or Elector (which is determined by whether or not they have earned suffrage, respectively) and their given name, which among Vaduzian crews is considered a somewhat private matter, said aloud only when necesarry and considered impolite to use outside of personal relationships.
Examples include:
- Kiev-02 Senior-Electrician Melnik, 9-2 Elector Niko
- Klarheit-01 Provisional-Steward Brnabić, 24-10P Citizen Lewis
- Revenance Administrator Poplawski, 1-1 Elector Janet
Assets
Vaduz holds an unwavering and overwhelming monopoly on Parime's orbital assets, posessing fifteen major space-stations ('major' in this instance referring to stations with a population exceeding 100,000) and hundreds of smaller stations within the orbit of Parime and its moons, supplemented by an appropriately large host of spacefaring vehicles.
History
The Vaduz originated in the earliest decades of Parime's colonisation as a subsidiary-organisation within the Parime Founding Colonies, a collection of pilots and engineers tasked with establishing gas-mining infrastructure on Parime itself. Despite initial setbacks (the most prominent being the first gas-scoop ship's catastrophic failure to withstand entry into Parime's atmosphere), the first orbital groups were able to succesfully establish rudimentary infrastructural ships and stations between Falias and Parime, establishing a reliable supply of Helium-3 isotopes for the colony's fusion powerplants.
Initially, the demand for parime's resources was manageable enough that the first 'spacers' only remained in the void between worlds for (relatively) short shifts before descending back into a gravity-well. As the demand increased however, the number of qualified spacers began to lag behind the number and complexity of the stations and ships needed to meet said demand, necesitating longer shifts that would inevitably begin to impact on their short and long term health. Attempts were made at creating simulated gravity through centrifugal spinners, but the current resources and technological levels of the colony (having regressed substantially due to the loss of the Kemys and one of its colony-landers) meant that such technologies were only a stopgap solution, and that alternatives had to be sourced until reliable spin-gravity could be attained.
The first breakthrough came in 4614u with the invention of the Vulcanoid-Class Implant Suite, which enabled spacers to live in microgravity for up to two and a half years. Through these implants were by nature broad and invasive, an overwhelming majority of spacers agreed to installation in exchange for employment benefits, dedicated personal-accomodations in orbital habitat modules and priority-listing for installations of newer iterations of the suite that would grant increasingly longer spans of living in space without adverse health-effects.
Over the ensuing decades, the population of Parime living in orbit saw a dramatic upswing as long-term habitation became tenable and dedicated space-colonies were constructed, housing communities and companies who would theoretically live their entire lives in space. The status and nature of such people and entities became the subject of intense legal and philosophical debate for years and creating numerous political schisms between the colonies on falias and the spacebound inhabitants above, whose identities and goals diverged from eachother into their own unique paths.
This came to a head in the opening years of the 48th century, when a group of orbital habitations and shipping-crews represented by the Rhine Conglomerates (making up 98.6% of spacefaring persons and assets) collectively petitioned for autonomy and self-determination as a people seperate from the PFC, stating that their cultures and issues have become so detached from those of Falias' surface colonies as to be irreconcilable in legislative decision-making in the wake of controversial political decisions made by the PFC's governing bodies.
After years of intense discussion and negotiation, in 4701u the PFC relented and agreed to sign the Free-Lanes Accords, a political agreement granting independant statehood to the colony's orbital habitats under the unified identity of the Vadus Orbital Collective. The terms of these accord had also led to the disbandment and redistribution of the Rhine Conglomerates into public hands, a consequence that was eventually found to have been against the wishes of the Rhine's leadership, who failed to discover the consequences of these terms before it was too late (and could not admit to such a failure until years after the fact, in an attempt to maintain face).
Over the following years, the Vaduz began to focus inwards on construction-projects and legislation, aiming to establish as much independance as possible from Falian infrastructure as possible through extended habitation-stations, asteroid mining platforms and an extended fleet of ships ferrying goods and people between them all. Despite best efforts to extract and process ice from captured asteroids however, the sheer demand of water through the collective was still large enough to necessitate continued importation from Falias, prompting continued political and economical contact with the landbound colonies.
Despite being centered in the Parime system's busiest trade-routes, the Vaduz maintained a distant and indifferent attitude towards most other goings-on within the system, making little objection when the gas-mining colonists in Parime itself seceded into the Helium Co-Operatives and only paying attention to matters on Falias when they affected trade with Vaduz. This attitude would come to change however, in the wake of the founding of the Falias United Colonies, whose growing stratocratic futurism brought harsh memories of the previous Falian regime's threatening expansionism back to Vaduz, prompting the collective to take a more active and defensive role in system politics.
This new atitude towards foreign affairs though, when the FUC responded to what they felt was an 'intrusion' on Vaduz's behalf by pushing back with increased military-presence in non-Vaduz orbital space, leading to an increasing tension between the two factions that would only intensify over the years.
These tensions would intensify in 4994u, when Vaduz succesfully recovered the intact core of an Omninode from the irradiated wreck of the Kemys and reestablished omninet-contact with the rest of humanity. Seizing opportunity, the Vaduz were quick to ensure exclusive use of omninet-technology within the system by refusing to divulge the necessary connecting-technology to the other factions, only allowing its use through their own omninet-connected systems through a local proxy, an act which provoked a great deal of controversy from the FUC and Helium Co-Operatives.
Such controversies were voiced by the FUC in the form of mounting economic pressure on Vaduz through substantially-increased water-ice tariffs, instigating the start of a cold war that inevitably broke into open hostilities with the disaster at Bregenz Agricultural-Habitat, which saw thousands dead and marked the begining of open hostilities between Vaduz and the FUC.
Vaduz however, had predicted and prepared for this: Amidst broader and more publicized communiqués with Union space, Chief-Administrator Duclos and several other key members of Vaduzian leadership had through unknown means made contact with representatives of the Smith Shimano Corpro-state and brokered a deal: In exchange for exchanges of DNA-profiles, planned construction of an SSC campus and mutual aid in extrastellar matters, the Vaduz Orbital Collective would be granted provisional licenses and manufacturing schemata for civil and military technology that would close the technological gap between Vaduz and the outside, whilst widening that same gap between themselves and the FUC by a considerable margin.
The FUC only learned of the results of this deal in full by the time of the military invasion and occupation of Falias' Artemis Port-City, which was a decisive victory in Vaduz's favor in spite of the overwhelming numerical and logistical advantage of the defending FUC, as the VSDC's cutting-edge military and VEP technology supplied by Smith-Shimano rendered much of the FUC's defences obsolete.
The conflict between Vaduz and the FUC only saw de-escalation with the arrival of Union administrative forces into the system restricting further hostilities into isolated (and often unsanctioned) skrimishes. With the FUC closing the tech-gap between themselves and Vaduz via newly-unrestricted Omni-net access and dealmaking with other military manufacturers, Vaduzian interest has been split between ending the conflict in a decisive decapitation-strike against the FUC or suing for peace before an unsustainable war of attrition against a logistically superior foe can emerge...
Military
Though many private entities are tasked with assisting Vaduz in operational security, the colonies primarily rely on the Vaduz Self-Defence Corps to deter foreign and domestic aggression. Though numerically superior to their counterparts in both the FUC and Co-Ops, the VSDC manage to stand on even ground by way of overwhelming naval dominance, a strong technological edge over the competition and more intensive, individual-focussed training and augmentation. DOJ/HR however, take a dim view on the VSDC's war-philosophy - their belief that displays of cruelty and brutality towards enemy combatants is not only valid, but optimal - and are taking measured action in pushing for changes in the esperit de corps.
"Above All"
Founding Date
4701
Type
Geopolitical, Country
Capital
Demonym
Vaduzian
Leader
Government System
Democracy, Representative
Power Structure
Autonomous area
Economic System
Mixed economy
Currency
Vaduz is currently a cashless society, with an entirely digital currency system regulating the value of money to quantities of water by legislative staff and (as of 5015u) NHPs. The official currency of Vaduz is the 'Lot' (abbreviated to '|L', with current exchange-rates valuing a single Lot to .0005 Manna or half a liter of water.
Subsidiary Organizations
Controlled Territories
Neighboring Nations
Manufactured Items
Organization Vehicles
Notable Members
Comments